How to implement an approval step before orders goes into Shipstation queue

[drewk]

Hello,

We need a way to keep orders from automatically going into the shipping queue in shipstation. Basically we need a sales manager to be able to approve every order before our warehouse ships it out, as these are high dollar items and often there are special requirements before shipping. We also triple check for fraud.

We want the shipstation queue to be clean, meaning that every order present there should be shipped immediately.

Any thoughts on how to accomplish this? It seems that out of the box Shopify simply marks payment status "paid" and those orders go into Shipstation.

One workaround is that we manually capture payments and use that as our approval process but that presents its own problems for our workflow/accounting and we cannot do that. 

Another workaround is to use the customer notes field to say something like "approved" which is then visible in the shipstation order notes, but that does not help our goal of keeping the queue in Shipstation clean and presents opportunities for mistakes on both ends. 

Thanks for any help you can give!

[dylanpierce]

As an app developer I would love this ability to add an additional custom status to an order. My ID verification app introduces a new stage after checkout and before fulfillment where the customer is required to verify their ID.

Unfortunately the best I can do for my merchants now is to add a custom tag & note on the order, but to add a custom status to the order would be very helpful for them to see what stage the order is truly on.

[Beacon-Jason]

Hi @drewk 

Can you give me a little bit more details on your fulfillment process with shipstation? There are a lot of ways to fulfill orders for shipment and a lot of it depends on how you want to configure Shopify to work for your fulfillment logistics.

Once I get a clear idea, I can perhaps give you some idea of what our other clients are doing with their automated fulfillment logistics while being able to filter out bad orders manually or automaticaly. 

[cornelle1]

Hi @drewk @Beacon-Jason @dylanpierce! Did anyone find a solution to this initial question? I am currently having the same exact dilemma. Would love to hear how you ended up going about solving this! Thanks

[drewk]

Hi @cornelle1 

No real solution yet. What we have done is given the approval manager a shipstation user account that can view all orders, and changed the warehouse user account (who actually ships the item) a restriction where they can only view orders assigned to them. 

We have multiple stores in Shipstation and use automation to assign the low dollar stores to the warehouse so no approval step is needed. The orders from the high value store are "approved" when the manager manually assigns the orders to the warehouse, after which they can be shipped. 

[Beacon-Jason]

Hi @cornelle1 @drewk  There are multiple creative solutions to do this, but it all involves you either you hire a programmer to implement this feature or download an app like Beacon that can put orders for review before being processed for shipping. As each merchant's shipping logistics are different, I'm sorry to say, but there is no simple way to to do this using's Shopify's default back-office system without some creative logistics being involved. 

You can set rules with filters like flagging higher value items that will add certain tags and features for each order for which will reduce your manager time in reviewing orders, but again, this is just a static system. If your shop is on Shopify Plus, you get the benefit of using Shopify Flow which can automate some of this tagging for you, which I recommend you look into. 

I hope this helps you a bit and let me know if there are any additional clarification needed. 

[drewk]

Hi @Beacon-Jason sorry, did not get this response. 

We have a few stores that ship through shipstation. Currently, for the lower-dollar stores, paid orders are simply in the "awaiting shipment" queue, and the warehouse knows to just refresh that queue every morning and ship what is in there. 

What I am concerned about is this new store has very high dollar items, and we need a manager to look at every order before it ships.

It does not appear that Shopify has any sort of functionality like this.

Our workaround is that the manager will have their own shipstation user account, and then we will use user roles for the warehouse user account. The warehouse will only be able to see orders assigned to them. So the manager will need to log in to Shipstation and approve orders in there by assigning them to the warehouse.

If you have any other ideas I love to hear them!